Saturday, May 22, 2004

Schwarzenegger's Saliva for Sale

Or at least it was, the LA Times says. Some guy fished the governor's used cough drop out of the trash and attempted to sell it on eBay for $500. Then the eBay anti-commodification police (I wrote about this a bit here) removed the listing.

Here's the most interesting part. It's not impossible to sell the cough drop. The seller just needs to have a purpose other than selling a body part. So if this guy sold the cough drop as a "collectible," that would be ok. I wonder whether one could sell, say, Jennifer Aniston's hair, so long as the seller phrased the listing as "collectible from another era: remember when Rachel's hair was a hit?" Or something like that. Clearly I'm not cut out for eBaying. Just goes to show you that when it comes to commodification rules, line-drawing is hard.